


some weird sickness in the dark

by monsterq



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dreamsharing, F/M, Gen, M/M, Nightmares, Not Quite Canon Compliant But Close, Panic Attacks, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 04:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18218522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterq/pseuds/monsterq
Summary: Felix is panicking. Kethe, he’s fucked up, and I ain’t feeling too hot myself, since you ask. But that don’t explain it right. It’s like we’re blurring into each other the way raindrops do running down a wall, and his feelings are bouncing off mine are bouncing off his, echoing and getting bigger and more fucked up by the second. So when Keeper’s suddenly there and she starts undoing my trousers, and she says, “Don’t just sit there, Milly-Fox. Touch me,” and my hand goes up like a puppet’s to her waist, her ribs, my thumb brushing over her nipple in her clothes the way she likes—when that happens, I feel like I’m shaking apart, like I can’t do this no more, like if it goes on for one more second I’ll just break into pieces like glass meeting a boot.Mildmay dreams. Suddenly, he isn't dreaming alone.





	some weird sickness in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place between The Virtu and The Mirador. Title from "Liza Forever Minelli" by The Mountain Goats. Thanks to [Lena7142](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lena7142) for looking this over!

 

Mildmay

The dream started out normal. Not any kind of fun, I’ll give you that, but normal, far as that goes for a dream. I’m in the Hall of the Chimeras behind Felix, and the Lord Protector is up there on his chair, looking about as pissed off as usual. People are talking, and I can’t exactly make out what they’re saying, but Lord Stephen looks kind of like a storm cloud trying to decide if it feels like throwing lightning. But then he changes, and all of a sudden he’s Keeper—Keeper’s been up there all along. She looks straight at me with her eyes like the flat of a knife and crooks her finger at me. And of course I go, ’cause I can’t do nothing else. It don’t matter that there’s maybe a Great Septad of hocuses and flashies standing around staring. Even Felix and the binding-by-forms don’t matter. If he’s saying something, I can’t hear it. Keeper crooks her finger and I go, like I’m still her clockwork bear.

The bitch of the thing is, I ain’t even got to the strange part.

So she pulls me up close to her with her gray knife eyes and that smile like winter, up the steps and to Lord Michael’s Chair until I’m straddling her lap, all them hocuses still watching. And she puts her finger, cold as a corpse, under my chin and says, “Goodness, Milly-Fox, you couldn’t even visit?”

I don’t have nothing to say to that, but of course she don’t give a fuck, and she says, “Kiss me.” Not her usual, but fucked if I didn’t see it coming. So I take a breath like I’m diving into the Sim, and I do.

And that’s when it goes weird.

She changes under me. Not like water into ice, but like one of them pictures where it turns from a pretty flashie girl into an old lady, or faces switch into a vase, just along of you’re looking at it different, when nothing’s really changed at all. But Keeper ain’t an old lady or vase or nothing like that—she’s—

Strych fists his hand in my hair and pulls me down again when I try to jump away, my heart beating at the bars of my ribs like it thinks someone might let it out if it just makes enough of a racket. My hair is different, and I’m smaller, unless I just forgot how damn big he was. Then his dry mouth is pressing into mine, and I can feel him smiling, grinning wider as I struggle, but I can hear this voice in my head saying,  _ Stop, stop, you’ll make it worse— _

I should figure it out then, but I don’t, maybe ’cause I can’t fucking think. I don’t figure it out until one of them damn pictures turns my brain inside out again, and I’m standing on the dais watching me and Strych. Thing is, it ain’t me. It’s Felix.

He can’t be much past his second septad, and I can’t see his face, but I know him like I know north. His hair is curlier than when he’s grown, and he’s skinny as a street dog, and Strych is digging his ringed fingers into Felix’s hip like he plans to tear what meat there is right off. Felix is kind of pressing away from it and into it at the same time, and I can see him shaking.

And the really fucked-up thing is—everything, since you ask, but what I mean is, I can see it and feel it, both at once. It’s like I’m standing here and sitting on Malkar, I mean Strych, at the same time. I can see Strych’s other hand tangle in Felix’s hair, and I can feel the sharp pain of it pulling, and I can see Felix’s bare feet tensing, and I can feel the hard press of Malkar’s— _ Strych’s _ —cock up between my legs.

And I can feel other stuff, too: fear, mostly. And this burning-up kind of need to make Strych happy.

I ain’t the one having this dream. Or the one it came from, anyway.

Wake up, Milly-Fox. Open your fucking eyes. This is a dream, yours or not, so wake up, you stupid, useless fuck—but I can’t.

All at once, Malkar shoves Felix off him so he lands hard on the floor, and I feel it all along my back, the breath punched out of my lungs, and when I can see again, Malkar’s got a whip in his hand.

Please no, I think, and I don’t know whose thought it is, and then it all shifts again.

I’m strung up by my wrists like a pig getting ready to die, only the other way up, and Strych is standing in front of me looking like he’s just having the best day of his life. Except he can’t be, because I ain’t Felix. He’s in his shirtsleeves and carrying—the dream flickers. I can’t see it right; it falls in and out of focus, like I’ve hit my head too hard. My head hurts enough for it, too. A flash of Strych with his hand knotted in my hair, agony coming from, fuck, everywhere. I don’t want to know more. Another flash: blood, my own voice snarling like a cornered dog, more pain, like there’s never been nothing else.

I hear a voice. Someone is screaming  _ stop _ . But it’s not me. They’re calling my name, too, and then I see him, see Felix standing behind the blurred patch of nothing that’s got to be Strych, staring me right in the eyes. Powers, his are wide and wild as the Sim in a storm, that spooky blue and yellow grabbing hold of me, and then I feel it, the obligation d’âme, wrapped around my insides like a hand and yanking. Yanking me away.

Course, Kethe likes his jokes, so where I end up when the world quits tumbling is Keeper’s bed. Powers and saints, I think, not this again.

I feel Felix inside me now, or maybe around me, like a feeling in the air and in my gut. And he’s panicking. Kethe, he’s fucked up, and I ain’t feeling too hot myself, since you ask. But that don’t explain it right. It’s like we’re blurring into each other the way raindrops do running down a wall, and his feelings are bouncing off mine are bouncing off his, echoing and getting bigger and more fucked up by the second. So when Keeper’s suddenly there and she starts undoing my trousers, and she says, “Don’t just sit there, Milly-Fox. Touch me,” and my hand goes up like a puppet’s to her waist, her ribs, my thumb brushing over her nipple in her clothes the way she likes—when that happens, I feel like I’m shaking apart, like I can’t do this no more, like if it goes on for one more second I’ll just break into pieces like glass meeting a boot. I can taste the panic on the back of my tongue, and my head’s still killing me, and now my stomach’s getting in on it too, flipping and twisting like a circus freak until I think we’re going to gag and be sick all over her lap. And then, powers, we’ll really be in for it, and the trapped-animal fear just kicks up higher.

And then she ain’t Keeper again. He’s a big man with thick hands and the kind of beard that just means you can’t be fucked to shave, and we’re tiny. He’s got this look in his eyes that I’ve seen on a lot of guys before. It’s a look that says he knows he’s the strongest guy in the room, and he likes that a lot, and what he likes best is making sure the others know it too. Know it in a personal kind of way.

He towers over us, and all we want is to get away, but we know we can’t. His voice slams and bangs inside our head. We said no, and there’s nothing worse we could’ve done. We can smell the Sim on his hands. We wish our stupid rabbit heart would burst right here and now—it seems like it’s got to, the way it’s thrashing faster and faster till there ain’t no faster to go—but we keep on breathing in these hard, sharp gasps that cramp our lungs, and we can hear ourself begging, stupid words that won’t fit together right and pour out of our mouth like puke and river water. We can’t stop, can hardly understand ourself, and then he backhands us hard across the face and we crash to the ground, tasting blood.

He gives us another chance, and we can’t do nothing but take it. We swallow as much of the blood as we can as we push up to our knees.

 

I woke up like being knifed. My eyes shot open, and I saw the blackness of my little room in Felix’s quarters. I heard my own breath and my blood in my ears and nothing else. No one between my ears but me.

 

Felix

I’d believed I could prevent this. This kind of leakage. In retrospect, that had been pure blind folly. Arrogance—or perhaps not. Perhaps my refusal to admit the possibility was born less of vanity than of cowardice. Denial, which had always served me so well in the past. 

I sat up, not reaching for the lamp. Fabric clung to my sticky skin. Gideon wasn’t beside me; yesterday he’d found a collection of books that had sent him into near paroxysms of joy, and he was still going through them with Rinaldo and Simon, who’d made their own study of the texts.

Listening, I tried to hear Mildmay moving on the other side of the wall, but no sound reached my ears. Just as well. If I had to face my brother, I’d likely savage him. Not that he’d done anything wrong, but then, that never was the reason.

Suddenly the dark pressed in on me like water across my nose and mouth. I called witchlights and forced myself to take deep breaths, to understand that around me was only air, dry and clear. I was alone.

Mildmay’s face flashed before me, twisted in pain as Malkar hurt him in ways he couldn’t bring himself to remember. Again, I felt the phantom agony; this time it was only a ghostly echo. My nails cut into my palms with the knowledge that it was my fault he’d been trapped with Malkar at all, my fault he had those memories, locked away as they were. It never lost its bite. I’d as good as delivered him to the man I hated most. I’d given him up to the same kind of torment that had shaped me into the thing I was today.

And now he’d seen a splinter of my own time with Malkar, with Keeper, and I hated that no less intensely. He’d seen the child I’d tried to lock away, knowing I could never kill him—a weak, whimpering whore, eager to spread his legs for any creature that would touch him. 

Sometimes I thought of that child more kindly, but just now, with the image fresh in my mind, all I could feel was disgust. My stomach swooped with a flicker of Keeper standing over me, and I pushed the memory away. 

Clearly, I’d lapsed in my control over my dreams. I’d been so busy after returning to the Mirador, but that was no excuse. I could never let this happen again.

And Mildmay…should I offer to ward his dreams? Or should I pretend this hadn’t happened? Did I even have the right to raise the subject? I could still feel the echo of his presence in my mind, that oneness we had shared. I ached with it.

I remembered the sick feeling of his keeper’s body under my hands, her eyes watching me like polished stone over that small, dead smile. I remembered the sense of inevitability in my—Mildmay’s—gut. The way obedience could not even be called a choice. I’d had some level of awareness of his dreams since I had performed the obligation d’âme, but nothing this visceral.

I should offer. I’d do it casually, as if it had occurred to me apropos of nothing. I wouldn’t mention tonight.

For now, though, I needed water. My mouth was parched, and I was drenched in sweat. I swung my feet out of bed and listened carefully for a moment, but I heard no movement out in the sitting room, so I tied on my robe and crossed to open the door.

At the very same moment, Mildmay opened his.

We stared at each other. I felt stripped bare by his eyes on mine, flayed. I considered fleeing back into my room—or to somewhere else, anywhere else, in the Mirador, never mind that I was only half-dressed. Then Mildmay dropped his eyes, squared his shoulders, and came fully into the sitting room. He limped across the floor to the water pitcher and poured a little into a basin to splash his face. I closed my door behind me and stood by it, unsure what else to do. The water darkened the edges of his unbound hair, and he stood with one hand on the table, not looking in my direction.

I was afraid to speak, for fear I would attack him. Or that my voice would break.

He broke the silence as he poured himself a cup of water. “You want any?”

For a moment, I couldn’t answer. He was uncomfortable, shifting on his feet, and still and always so Mildmay. Looking after me. Caring. I could think of nothing I deserved less.

I cleared my throat. “Yes, thank you.” I walked over to meet him as he poured; no sense making him come to me. He handed me the cup and then lowered himself carefully into a chair; I cleaned my hot face and neck in the basin before sitting opposite him.

I was tense as a coiled spring, but he said nothing, sipping his water, and I allowed myself to glance at him. He was paler than usual, his scar livid against his skin. A drop rolled from his hairline down his cheek and clung to his jaw; he brushed it away. His expression was as opaque as ever, but I saw shadows in his eyes.

_ Nightmares? _ I could feel the word on the edge of my tongue and swallowed it back down. 

Mildmay stayed seated when he had finished drinking. He avoided my eyes, but I had the distinct impression it was for my sake at least as much as his.

“Sun’ll be coming up soon,” he said finally. “Don’t think I’ll sleep more.”

It didn’t surprise me that he knew, though we were at least a dozen walls away from dawn. I nodded. Found my voice. “I don’t suppose I will either.”

“You going out?” he asked.

I thought about it. I could find someone to talk to, someone with whom I could debate thaumaturgical minutiae until my mind was washed clean of this wretched night. I could find a bottle of wine; I could find any number of people to invite me to their beds.

There were dark circles under Mildmay’s eyes. He traced his thumb over the rim of his cup, rubbing away a smudge. His shoulders curved down and inward.

“I was thinking of spending time with  _ A Study of Norvenan Folklore _ ,” I said. “You seemed interested when Gideon and I discussed it last Jeudy. Would you like to hear me read it?”

The look he gave me hurt. He thought I was mocking him. The expression faded, though, as he examined my face; then he nodded. “That sounds okay. If you…yeah.”

I tried a smile. Through long practice, it didn’t shake, and when Mildmay’s face brightened in his unsmiling way, it even felt real. “Then let’s move somewhere more comfortable, shall we?”

I found the book, and we settled in armchairs by the fireplace. As I flipped through the pages, I took one more glance at him, searching the depths, as fathomless and buried as the Mirador’s halls, that I knew lay behind his eyes. I thought I saw the tangled web of our dreams there, what he had seen of my life and what I had seen of his—but that might just as easily have been my own ghosts, projected onto the blank slate that Mildmay so often pretended to be. 

Still, he leaned closer as I began to read.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at [monsterquill.tumblr.com](http://monsterquill.tumblr.com). Come talk to me! (Especially about this series.)


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